The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was established in 1950 to conduct spying overseas and morally repulsive covert operations. It had a slow start, but in the 1970s it sent three staff to Chile to help the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. To its credit, ASIS opposed the deployment in which Continue reading »
politics
Sometimes Israel’s crimes are so horrific that at first you don’t even understand what you’re looking at. You just stare at it trying to make sense of what you’re seeing for a bit, like you would if you suddenly saw a space alien or a leprechaun or something. It happened to me yesterday when I Continue reading »
“Digital platforms continue to provide vested fossil fuel actors with a cheap and easy way to disinform the public about climate change,” said one campaigner. An analysis published Wednesday shows that major fossil fuel corporations have pumped millions of dollars into digital advertising this year in the lead-up to the COP28 talks, part of a Continue reading »
The new National Party led government for New Zealand will be New Zealand’s first cabinet coalition of three parties. Their joint agreement, hammered out during a month of difficult negotiations, will reverse a number of reforms introduced by the outgoing Labour Government and cut public service staff to approach 2017 levels. The outgoing Prime Minister Continue reading »
John Edmund Ryan, OBE was a former soldier, career diplomat and acting director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). He entered Australian folklore on 30 November 1983 when an ASIS team raided Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel, during a training exercise. The subsequent political controversy engulfed the federal labor government and it claimed Ryan’s career, with Continue reading »
Tony Abbott added two new posts to his resume this month, debuting as Fox director and announced to be “joining the Danube Institute team as a guest lecturer.” Add these to the October news that Abbott is now an Advisory Board member of the far-right Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Australians should be watching. Hungarian Continue reading »
Dozens of ‘small modular reactor’ designs are being promoted but precious few will reach the construction stage and the likelihood of SMRs being built in large numbers is negligible. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are defined as reactors with a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW) or less. The term ‘modular’ refers to serial factory production of Continue reading »
It is more than 20 years since Labor Leader Simon Crean addressed Australian troops leaving to fight in the Bush-Blair-Howard war on Iraq. “I don’t believe that you should be going,” he said, absent a United Nations determination. “But that’s a political decision, that’s an argument that the prime minister [John Howard] and I will Continue reading »
Henry Kissinger’s death draws to a close the epoch of intellectualism in foreign policy to which he was committed following his early study of and belief in a system of organised strategic balance and restraint of the kind that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century. I first met Henry Kissinger in Continue reading »
Opposition leader (LOL) Peter Dutton has said: ”Who?” When asked today about the whereabouts of his shadow Indigenous Affairs minister Jacinta Nampijimpa Price. ”I’m not sure who this Jacinta person is that you are asking about,” said the Opposition leader.... Read More ›